Um olhar antropológico sobre o patrimônio cultural: sentidos, significados e ressignificações do Museu Mariano Procópio (MMP)

Abstract

The object of this work is Museu Mariano Procópio (MMP), formed by Alfredo Ferreira Lages’s practice of collecting and donated to Prefeitura Municipal de Juiz de Fora in 1936. Its collection is the second biggest of the Imperial Period, it distinguishes itself for important works such as the uniform that D. Pedro II wore in the Majority Ceremony in 1840; the picture ‘Tiradentes Esquartejado’, painted by Pedro Américo; porcelain from Companhia das Índias; part of the furniture of the Imperial Family; beyond the documental collection and the library of rare works. This patrimony was frequented and visited by important people as D. Pedro II and his family, politicians and intellectuals. It has become an icon in the construction of regional and national identities because of the symbols and speeches disposed through its arrangement. Thus, this dissertation aims at identifying, through an anthropological perspective, the perceptions of a collectivity about the net of feelings and meanings constructed through the dialog with the material object in a certain context and its nuances, producing individual and collective memories and identities. We look for comprehend the process of appropriation of that object by the visitors and employees. We apprehend the production of the cultural patrimony as ‘narratives’ or as ‘discursive formation’ that make possible to map the symbolic content, aiming at describing the nation formation and constituting the cultural identity. We analyze Museu Mariano Procópio in the light of the notion of the ‘Total Social Fact’ overlapped in the cultural dynamics, discussing the mechanisms and the effectiveness of the patrimony while former of that identity. Since this space doesn’t appear as a physical or natural product, but above all, as a social construction, a social historical result of disputes around the meaning of the territory and susceptible to changes. This work is based on the museum as a symbolic space of different social actors, as well as on the analysis of speeches produced about the material patrimony, through the relation man/object/context in a certain locus and its disposition through conflicts and attempts of appropriation of the patrimony by several sectors.